“The organs of vegetation are the _Root_, _Stem_, and _Leaves_. The _Stem_ is the axis and original basis of the plant.”
“The first point of the stem preëxists in the embryo (_i. e._ in the rudimentary plantlet contained within the seed): it is here called the radicle.” Such is the rudiment of mind, already partially developed, more than a bud, but pale, having never been exposed to the light, and slumbering coiled up, packed away in the seed, unfolded [_sic_].
Consider the still pale, rudimentary, infantine, radicle-like thoughts of some students, which who knows what they might expand to, if they should ever come to the light and air, if they do not become rancid and perish in the seed. It is not every seed that will survive a thousand years. Other thoughts further developed, but yet pale and languid, like shoots grown in a cellar.
“The plant ... develops from the first in two opposite directions, _viz._ upwards [to expand in the light and air] to produce and continue the stem (or _ascending axis_), and downwards [avoiding the light][169] to form the root (or _descending_ axis). The former is ordinarily or in great part aërial, the latter subterranean.”
So the mind develops from the first in two opposite directions: upwards to expand in the light and air; and downwards avoiding the light to form the root. One half is aërial, the other subterranean. The mind is not well balanced and firmly planted, like the oak, which has not as much root as branch, whose roots like those of the white pine are slight and near the surface. One half of the mind’s development must still be root,—in the embryonic state, in the womb of nature, more unborn than at first. For each successive new idea or bud, a new rootlet in the earth. The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his roots into the womb of things. The infant is comparatively near the surface, just covered from the light; but the man sends down a tap-root to the centre of things.
The mere logician, the mere reasoner, who weaves his arguments as a tree its branches in the sky,—nothing equally developed in the roots,—is overthrown by the first wind.
As with the roots of the plant, so with the roots of the mind, the branches and branchlets of the root “are mere repetitions for the purpose of multiplying the absorbing points, which are chiefly the growing or newly formed extremities, sometimes termed _spongelets_. It bears no other organs.”